Last year, the store worked with the school's marketing students on their final projects to provide a slew of suggestions to implement, from adding a changing room and changing up the colors and promotional images used in the front of the store. Each class had its own suggestions for the store, but there was a strong common theme.

"The number one issue for both classes was our web page, which really had not undergone a transformation in eight years," said Matt Branca, director. "There were many different issues, but the overall issue was that our old site was ugly and just plain 'blugh.'"

Branca took the suggestions to heart, and contacted the school's web development team after the class presentations to discuss the possibility of a complete web design. Work began rebuilding the site that summer.

"The best part is that the team speaker for one of the best evaluations happened to also be a web design student who was an intern at the web development office, so at my pushing, she was assigned to our web redesign as her summer project," Branca said. "The complete design was her idea, and after everything was presented she work on the coding and deployment.We were most impressed with how everything came about and are really pleased that, for the most part, the entire redesign was created and deployed by students."

Even the display images were contributed by a student intern in the school's photo marketing department, who oversaw the photo shoot to capture the pictures used throughout the site.

Those involved with the web design process also worked closely with inSite Support Representative Chuck Parker, who provided support throughout the redesign and made sure everything was functioning properly — including a key new feature PCT took the opportunity to implement during the face lift.

"We also activated the ability for students to utilize Financial Aid as a payment option on the site," Branca said. "This was a huge success and worked flawlessly thanks to the help of Chuck and the rest of the inSite team."

Dean Asher is a former copywriter with MBS. Though he no longer writes for us, he is still proud of having helped this blog continue to evolve as an industry-leading resource of news and original content.

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